Novo Zhitomir

Novo-Zhitomir was an agricultural colony founded in 1849 by Jewish migrants from Zhitomir. also in Ukraine. In 1897 423 Jews , comprising 77 percent of the total population, lived in the colony. In the 1920s a Yiddish seven-year school with a library was opened in Novo-Zhitomir; it became a Ukrainian-language school in the late 1930s. In the late 1920s and 1930s a court with deliberations in Yiddish existed in the village and Novo-Zhitomir was the center of a Jewish rural council. According to the official census, in December 1926 Novo-Zhitomir’s 712 Jews comprised almost the whole population (actually 97.94 percent) of the village. German troops occupied the kolkhoz of Novo-Zhitomir on August 16, 1941. Only part of the Jews succeeded in leaving in time. Some of the Jews who left the village were forced to return due to the rapid advance of the German army. Those Jews who stayed in Novo-Zhitomir were confined in a makeshift, unfenced-off ghetto consisting of several houses. The ghetto inmates were abused and their property was looted. They were forced to work on the kolkhoz lands. At the beginning of 1942 the able-bodied Jews of Novo-Zhitomir were sent to Shirokoye labor camp to build the Krivoy Rog-Dnepropetrovsk Road. At the end of May 1942 they were joined by more Novo-Zhitomir Jews, who had been selected for heavy labor before the large-scale massacre of the remaining Jews of Novo-Zhitomir. The latter - women, children, and old people - were shot, together with Jews from Izluchistoye, Kamenka, and several other villages in the area, near the village of Zlatoustovka on May 30 or 31, 1942. The Jews of Novo-Zhitomir who were sent for forced work were mostly murdered in late 1942 or early 1943. Novo-Zhitomir was liberated by the Red Army on February 2, 1944.